Critical Equipment Monitoring in Production Platforms

Abstract

The offshore platforms, located at great distances from the coast, pose many challenges to maintain and increase reliability of critical equipment, in order to decrease operational and maintenance costs. The difference between planned and non-planned shutdowns can be roughly millions of dollars for one platform. These facts justify the need for an enhanced monitoring system for critical equipment of offshore platforms, contributing to reduce risks, loss of production, and to raise equipment availability. One way to deal with this problem is to have remote monitoring centers which follow performance indicators of the various critical platforms' equipment (heat exchangers, pumps, compressors, etc.), with the main goal of identifying deviations, before they evolve to more serious faults. This center should have a well trained staff, good process to foster multidisciplinary collaboration with other specialized teams to diagnose and define required actions, and, last but not least, good tools to monitor the process variables. This paper will describe a set of tools for monitoring equipment performance, such as heat exchangers, pumps, and compressors. These tools try to identify the quality of equipment's sensors, to assess the performance of PID controllers associated with this equipment, and many other performance indicators as, for example, deviations from the optimal (high efficiency) operating regions. These tools are connected with plant data information and acquire real time data (flowrates, pressures, and temperatures) from the process streams, and can send them to rigorous process simulator in order to close mass and energy balances. This strategy can reconcile data and infers missing operational information, like some key performance indicators. These tools can also receive inspection data of equipment, obtained by mobile systems, to be used to identify deviations from the desired operational region. Finally, this paper will also present results and gains of the application of these tools, process, and equipment monitoring center for offshore platforms. This paper will show the benefits to improve equipment reliability and safety, thus reducing risks and losses due to possible equipment failure. It will also presents and discuss new tools and process to monitor critical equipment.